Blog
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Building a web site: Think content first
February 11th, 2011 at 9:42am | 4 CommentsWhen people start thinking about building a web site, they often get caught up in how it will look. The colours, the layout, photography, etc. That stuff can be sorted out later. To start, the most important thing to be thinking of is content. Do you need an FAQ? Will your staff be committing to ... read more »
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PodCampHalifax 2011 Review
January 24th, 2011 at 6:35pm | 6 CommentsI thoroughly enjoyed the third annual PodCampHalifax unconference this past Sunday. Kudos to event organizers Craig More, Bessy Nikolaou, and Ryan Deschamps for putting together a hit. Things ran very smoothly and it’s clearly due to their hard work and commitment to the event. This was my first PodCampHalifax but not my first unconference event ... read more »
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Transfer from Paypal to a US Dollar Account at a Canadian Bank
November 12th, 2010 at 4:57pm | 30 CommentsSo, you’re Canadian and you often get paid in USD via Paypal. When you withdraw into your Canadian dollar (CAD) bank account, Paypal charges a premium for the currency conversion. A hefty 2.5% in fact. This is a common problem among freelancers like myself. Fortunately, I’ve recently discovered a way to avoid these currency conversion ... read more »
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Getting Comfortable with Peak Oil
October 14th, 2010 at 10:24am | 5 CommentsIt is a fact that oil is a finite resource. It is also a fact that at some point we will reach the maximum rate of oil extraction know as peak oil. Some believe we have already reached this plateau. In the recent documentary Collapse, Michael Ruppert exposes evidence of why he is certain we ... read more »
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WTF is dial-up grandpa?
August 27th, 2010 at 4:40pm | 1 CommentToday is my birthday. And although birthdays can be great for the gifts and attention, they are also a reminder of years gone by. In my annual birthday chat with my mom, I was telling her how my work was going and we started reminiscing of the challenges I faced when I was doing internet work in my teens. I thought I'd share. read more »
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Encrypting credit card information with OpenSSL
July 26th, 2010 at 9:10am | 4 CommentsRecently, when I researched the encryption of credit card information, or card holder data (CHD) as it’s known in the industry, I was somewhat frightened by what I found. Almost every tutorial suggested using MySQL’s AES functions. While AES is an excellent symmetric-key algorithm, a symmetric-key algorithm is not a great choice for storing CHD long ... read more »
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Building WordPressFreelancer.com: Fun with the latest, greatest web dev tech
July 14th, 2010 at 6:32am | 3 CommentsLast year I registered WordPressFreelancer.com with grand plans to build a directory of freelancers who work with WordPress complete with a job board and blog consisting of freelancer interviews. Once I sobered up, I realized I already had more than enough on my plate and that this probably wasn’t going to happen. Recently however, I ... read more »
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What does it cost to build a web site?
April 4th, 2010 at 11:08am | 13 CommentsI’m often asked by friends and family, “What does it cost to build a web site?” And although I’m sure none of them will read this, at least now I have something to point them to. Asking “What does it cost to build a web site?” is a lot like asking, “What does it cost to ... read more »
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Firefox Error Message: “Well, this is embarrassing.”
September 1st, 2009 at 9:52am | 10 CommentsI received this amusing Firefox error message when opening Firefox this morning. The strange thing is that Firefox still let me load all my tabs from the previous browsing session, so I’m not sure if there was actually a problem. I upgraded an extension as I was opening, but I’m not sure if it was ... read more »
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Fix WordPress “Missed schedule” error on Media Temple (dv) / Plesk
July 18th, 2009 at 10:37pm | 12 CommentsAfter a lot of debugging, I was able to figure out that Media Temple’s (dv) configuration was responsible for the “Missed schedule” errors I was getting in WordPress. By default, the /etc/hosts file looks like this: 127.0.0.1 yourdomain.com yourdomain localhost localhost.localdomain To execute cron tasks, WordPress needs to post to the URL http://yourdomain.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron. This isn’t ... read more »